MeeHive to Shut Down

I am saddened to hear that Meehive will stop its services this month. I had great hopes for it- it promised to deliver a personalised newspaper, the user interface was good to look at. Meehive had autopost features that allowed you to share links and comments to Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, it never got off. There was no conversations. All I got news of in the "Your Friends Activity" is Louis making friends one after another, to no purpose. No one was doing any talking.

Actually, I need a personalised newspaper that delivers me news that I am interested in. There are two ways to go about it- one is the RSS way, where I subscribe to the feeds I am interested in, and sit back and wait for the news and posts to come into my reader. This is the way it has worked so far, but with the popularity of Twitter and Facebook, where you get news more dynamically, the idea of using a passive reader is somewhat passe.

Meehive was a step further from that idea. It let you choose your topics, and then comment and share the feed that came in. Adding and deleting topics were easy, you could do that with a click, and the it was possible to set it up so that your comments would show up in Twitter and Facebook. But then, no one was talking.

I feel they should have changed a few things to make it more interesting- but I suppose their idea of what we wanted was not in sync with what we are comfortable with. So it goes.

And in its place, the email from Meehive team tells me, is Tweetbeat and Tweetbeat Firsthand. Sorry, this one won't work. Who is going to sit watching tweets on a particular topic or person and retweet and reply them? It gets boring after the first few minutes. And then, if the topic is real hot, the tweets pour in quicker than you could possibly read. Come on, it gets stale after a while. It will, won't it- how many original thoughts can you generate on any given issue? That is what Tweetbeat is.

If you thought Tweetbeat is bad, it gets worse with Firsthand. You are supposed to download a browser addon so that when you visit a page, you get blue icons next to names and things people have tweeted about. All you need do is go hover over the icon, and you can read what Tweeple are saying about that.

Why would you do that? Suppose I am interested to read something about the Big Bang theory because there is something about it on CBS. I open a page and a blue icon comes up somewhere near Big Bang Theory, I hover over there, and get this-

  

i heart Shamy! #bigbangtheoryFri Oct 08 00:04:28 via webBenal Patel
BenalPatel

See?

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What we need is something that combines the dynamics of Twitter and Facebook with a more traditional feed reader.  The feed reader part should get the feeds of the links that are shared by my friends and lists that I follow, and display them in full- video, audio, text, whatever, preferably in Readability format. And there should be a panel where I can interact with my friends the way I do in Twitter or Facebook.

This should not be too difficult. Why don't someone think of it- a site with the usual single sentence format of Twitter that can be expanded to show the full text. And if you choose to,  you can post it back to Twitter or Facebook or pass it on to your contacts or Blog or whatever...

It should be possible. 

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